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Rotarian Robert Segal and Wife Jeanne Help Others

Despite our best efforts, family and friends are sometimes ill equipped to help a loved one in emotional distress. This reality confronted Rotarian Robert and Jeanne Segal in October of 1996, when their middle child Morgan Leslie Segal took her own life.

Morgan was described by many who knew her as "an angel," "a rising talented writer," and "a young woman with great intelligence and sensitivity." Nevertheless, she grappled with a condition that started as low self-esteem and gradually worsened. Six years of psychotherapy and a variety of drug prescriptions did not help her. In desperation, she ended her life at age 29.

Ten days after tragedy struck, Robert asked to open the meeting of his Rotary Club of Santa Monica to talk about Morgan's death. The meeting gave him an opportunity to verbalize his grief and to touch other broken hearts. After the meeting, several people approached him and shared similar experiences of relatives who attempted or committed suicide or suffered from debilitating mental Illnesses.

Robert and Jeanne wanted to honour the memory of their daughter through a project that would help people in similar trouble by guiding them toward appropriate information and care. The Rotary club formed a new committee on Mental Health and Caring for the Aging. The committee then teamed with the Center for Healthy Aging to create awareness of "Where to Turn for Help."

Helpguide is a website project of the Rotary Club of Santa Monica and Center for Healthy Aging. The goal of the website is to help empower people by guiding them toward appropriate information and care for their problems and needs.

The goals have evolved dramatically since Helpguide's rather humble beginnings. They expanded the scope to include many more topics, a thorough introduction / overview for each topic as well as links to carefully selected non-commercial websites to facilitate "delving deeper." The website has a highly qualified, professional team updating, expanding, refining and polishing all of the articles. They are all encouraged by both the feedback they have received and the three-fold increase in traffic over the past year. Helpguide is now attracting almost 400,000 visitors per month.

Robert and Jeanne believe that if Morgan and the family had available the resources on Helpguide, her life might have had a very different outcome. As an example, in 2002 Jeanne was diagnosed with a rare tumour in her brainstem. This time the Internet played a vital role for her family in understanding her condition and finding a highly qualified surgeon. The resulting surgery has been immensely successful.

Robert and Jeanne, and members of the Rotary Club of Santa Monica hope visitors to the Helpguide website will be inspired to use the power of the Internet to help resolve key issues in their own life or in the lives of family and friends. Robert and Jeanne hope website visitors will have better informed discussions with health care providers, and through "shared decision making" their lives will be healthier and happier.

You can visit the Helpguide website at www.helpguide.org

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